by PJ Manney
ESP was antithetical to everything he was trained to believe. Like most scientists, it was easier to reject paranormal experience than consider it consistent with laws of the universe, even if scientists knew they didn’t fully understand the universe yet. It had been easier to ignore what might help him succeed than consider the implications.
“You should tie me to the mast. Maybe if Captain Ahab tied himself to the mast, he wouldn’t have died and the Pequod would’ve been saved.”
Fear grew in Talia’s eyes. “Shhh, baby, shhh . . . it’ll stop soon.”
“This isn’t a drug trip, babe. This is me. And I like me.” Surrendering to multireality made him feel better about everything. Somehow simple complexity and rational irrationality loosened hatred’s grip from his mind.
But forewarned curiosity (what else could you call curiosity when a brain sensed the future?) got the better of him. He closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears to dampen sensory input and mentally searched the lab’s database for Ruth’s research on Anthony Dulles’s download. Prometheus’s algorithms proved incomplete and Ruth had to put the project aside to work on the bots. And what better way to decode thoughts than with a real, augmented neural system, like his brain? He opened the program and downloaded and processed data faster with his newly hacked ’n’ jacked intellect than any purely electronic computer program could.
It was like swimming through thoughts as information. One moment, he floated above and around, treading data while looking for patterns. And the next, he was submerged within it. He was Anthony Dulles, his skull splayed open in the American Dream’s dining room, terrified equally of dying and revealing anything that might get Peter Bernhardt killed. He wasn’t sure how those implants in him and the boy worked, but he had hoped Peter could read his mind, silently conveying Josiah’s dreadful plans.
The irony was painful. If only Dulles had realized how far Peter was from real telepathy.
Josiah’s questions were clever. They exposed the spy’s knowledge of Josiah’s role as architect of the most deadly terrorist plot in history and sought Dulles’s mole.
He dived into the data again. Dulles’s mole . . . Dulles’s mole . . . The person had to be here, somewhere. Dulles could never have known so much about Peter Bernhardt or the 10/26 plot without a mole. Tom swam deep to find it. He discovered Vera data and Dulles’s thoughts about her were pragmatic, Machiavellian. She had served her purpose, and while he’d regret her death, believing it was inevitable given the geopolitics, he wouldn’t lose sleep about it. She was a big girl who got in with her violet eyes wide open.
But there was someone else, deeper still, even more involved, but hidden. He dived down further. And found the mole.
Carter Potsdam.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Tom?” Talia shook his shoulders in concern.
Certainty flooded him again. Carter knew he was doing wrong, but couldn’t stop. Instead, he’d do wrong and then tell Dulles in the hopes someone could stop it for him. Carter tried to have it both ways, just as Josiah had warned. Tom assumed the CEO of Prometheus planned to delete his own starring role as Dulles’s mole from the cortex download and Josiah’s prying eyes. And Dulles’s extensive Peter Bernhardt dossier was exposed. It wasn’t from Talia. It was from his best friend.
As Dulles’s download suffused his brain, he lived the dying man’s hopes, fears, regrets, anger—thoughts filled with the family he left behind, final moments of resignation, as well as the associations that made those final thoughts possible. Children and grandchildren Tom never knew felt as intimate as his own. Even physical sensations of anesthesia, restraints, and pain flooded back, causing similar torture in his body. It felt like spirit possession. Or channeling.
“Tom?” Talia shook him again.
He opened his eyes. “The mole is Carter Potsdam. And Dulles thought about you before he died. He was sorry for what he did, and he prayed you’d be all right.”
She jerked back as from electrical shock. “How?”
“I’m Anthony Dulles.”
Terrified, she pulled farther away.
“You don’t understand . . . I’ve cracked his processor data. It’s in my head now, as my own memories. I’m him. And I’m me. At the same time.”
“Please, enough . . .”
“But he wanted you to know this. He thought he could communicate to me telepathically and hoped I might tell you some day. You were right. He regretted everything he did to you and never forgave himself for your father’s death.” His eyes narrowed with new sorrow. “I was worried about you and yet I still dragged you into this all over again. Some Cold Warrior. Pathetic old fool, aren’t I? What was I thinking?”
She recognized the expression. Her eyes filled with tears. “Stop it . . . please . . .”
“Can you ever forgive me?”
“Who am I forgiving?” she exploded.
“I thought Dulles was your friend. I thought you might want some closure . . .”
“Shut up!” She slammed her right hand on the deck.
His right hand ached sulfur green, and he cradled it, stunned.
“You’re not even human anymore,” she cried. “I don’t know what you are . . .”
“Not human? I just felt your pain. And if that doesn’t make me human, I don’t know what does.”
But how much longer could he consider himself completely human, if by “human” she meant as intellectually and empathetically hobbled as everyone else? Maybe this was what Nietzsche meant by the Übermensch. Was he really a separate species now, Homo excelsior, as different from the Homo sapiens around him as the Homo sapiens were from the Neanderthals? Or was it more like Homo sapiens versus australopithecines? They were all “human,” so the definition would have to expand to fit him.
“How do I describe what I see?” said Tom. “What I know? Can you understand I see spinning helixes of DNA not just connected, but part of the spinning of the planet, the spinning of the solar system, the entropy of the universe? Each spins in its own frequency, creating a tone, a note. Together, it’s music. And I hear it. Our intelligence is not unique. There’s intelligence in everything. And it’s growing. We’re made of stardust and it’s not a metaphor or scientific theory. I see it. I feel it. I am it.”
She tried to hide her terror in disgust and spat, “No, you’re some newbie Lucy . . .”
“This isn’t LSD . . .”
Dulles’s thoughts continued to churn. The more Tom discovered, the more Carter had to be stopped. And only Tom could do it. Carter begged him to.
Talia was determined. “We have to get you help. We have to fix this.”
He reached out to touch her face. Her purple chocolate strummed velvet across his body, and he closed his eyes to wallow in the sensations for a moment. “I need these changes. Otherwise, it won’t be the same world a week from now. And you won’t want to live in it.”
Psychedelia and enlightenment distracted him from his task and could no longer be tolerated. He would steel his heart and mind to tend his fire, fuel it to burn bright, no matter how in love he had fallen with the universe. He concentrated on culling the bot’s effects down to just the information he needed and kept club memories running on an endless loop. Talia grew less velvety purple chocolate, but he kept a little bit for his own enjoyment. He looked out at the coastline, sparkling champagne in the lemon sun.
“In the land of the blind, the multi-eyed man is God,” he said. “And it’s time to do my job.”
“If you think we’re blind because we’re not like you, you’re kidding yourself. And if you think you’re God . . .”
His head felt clearer, and he hauled himself up the mast to stand. “I know I’m not God. I’m just a sheriff with a mighty big gun.”
The sound of crying was muffled behind Ruth’s door. Tom knocked gently.
“Arein!”
He peeked in. “Ruthie?”
She rocked back and forth on the sofa and raised her head to glare with twitc
hy eyes. Books, papers, and clothes were strewn all over. She found a plastic garbage bag and dumped a few pathetic things in, half spilling everything on the floor.
“A mentsh tracht und Gott lacht,” she barked. “Which are you?”
“A man plans and God laughs? I’m a man.”
“Too bad. I would like to talk to God. Finally someone smart enough to answer my questions.”
He gestured to the room. “I can see you’re packing . . .”
“Ziss greena tzu arein az vy aroys gekimmen.”
“It’s easier to go into something than to get out of it? And that includes me?”
“I don’t answer rhetorical questions. All your questions are rhetorical, now you are an Übermensch.”
She didn’t say “mein Übermensch” anymore.
“But you know I have the best of reasons,” he said.
“Everyone has their reasons,” she spat.
He crouched at her feet, but not too close. “I understand. But what can I do for you, Ruthie?”
“I want t-t-to go to China. I have friends there. They’ll t-t-take me in.”
“Done. A helicopter will take you to a Chinese ship. They’ll be paid handsomely to make sure you get to your contacts.” He mentally made the arrangements and paid her as well, transferring fifty million dollars to her Swiss account, created for an emergency such as this.
“I never wanted your money . . .”
“I know, Ruthie. I’ll miss you . . .”
Her lowered head swung back and forth and incessant twitching flung tears from her face, falling on the carpet like raindrops. One fell on a clipped glass slide that had fallen out of the plastic bag. It joined two blood drops into one.
“Vos vet zein, vet zein,” said Ruth.
“What will be, will be.” Tom knew that better than anyone.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
There were two messages on his mental GO. The first was a text from Josiah:
Thanks again for your words in the car. Mess will be cleaned up once and for all. Will send travel details.
The second was from Bruce:
El Señor Presidente—my place, eight tonight.
Meanwhile, Tom downloaded martial arts techniques, floor plans, and staff schedules from Lobo’s house, and anything else that might come in handy. But was all of this learning at his neuron tips worth it? Especially when disturbing images of things to come kept flashing through his mind?
The Malibu Pier was built in 1905, but refurbished over the decades. Many people of all ages and races walked along its white-and-marine-blue length in the setting summer sun to fish, enjoy the view, or eat at the restaurants near its entrance.
Tom’s launch from the Pequod delivered him to the pier. His limo waiting at its entrance would ferry him to Bruce’s home nearby.
But he saw more than the visitors enjoying a California landmark. He saw it freshly built, unpainted, and empty of buildings. Cattle grazed in the hills above. Sweaty stevedores loaded pallets of hides, fruit, and barrels of milk from a private railroad terminus onto a steamship.
At the same time, Malibu Pier didn’t exist. Tom floated above the water lapping twenty feet below. Two young Chumash Indian boys, skin ruddy bronze like Amanda’s, and wearing only a net at their waist that held tools and rudimentary weapons, played tag with a driftwood stick.
The dislocation from a tangible reality made him queasy. He stopped, afraid of taking another step. Suddenly, not only was the pier gone, so was the beach. He was submerged in water, although he didn’t feel wet. The shoreline consumed the coastline’s cliffs. But was this a distant past or future?
He tamped down his visual-stimulus pathways and concentrated on the weather-beaten pier and its tourists, the one he felt sure was the present. The other scenes fell away like pages in a book he could flip at will.
Was he witnessing the truth of time? That it was nothing like the linear story we experience, but instead simultaneous and elastic, like cosmologists’ mathematical formulas implied? Or was he hallucinating, his mind bored with too much processing power and not enough to process? Was multireality a phantom limb made by his imagination to keep neurons stimulated and happy?
As he approached Lobo’s house, the ghost-feeling was stronger than ever. One moment, he felt grounded in the here and now, the next he free-floated in cyberspace/unreality. Was this what God (whose existence he still doubted) felt like? The convergence of worlds would be too much for anyone, no less him.
And what if he was simply insane?
He focused hard on the present, but couldn’t help wondering if he was dead or alive.
The door opened automatically, and Bruce’s voice came through a speaker.
“Compadre! Please come in and allow us to examine you.”
Inside the front door, Tom’s Hoover cane tapped the walls of a see-through foyer made of two-inch-thick bulletproof Plexiglas, which made it impossible to pass into the house without permission. The front door closed and locked behind him, and he felt a tickle through his body. He was being scanned for weapons.
After a minute, Bruce’s voice returned. “Well, you’re certainly loaded for bear. But as far as I can tell, not for me. Welcome.”
The clear doors slid open, and a burly black security guard approached. He wore his hair in a modified ’fro, with sideburns and ’stache, very Shaft.
“Sir?” Shaft took Tom’s arm and led him into the huge living room. Inside was as relentlessly white and oversized as outside. White walls, white polished marble floors laid in a geometric parquet of right angles and boxes. All the sleek furniture’s upholstery was white. Ceilings strained past sixteen feet to contain art, some of it white-on-white. Everything was big. Beachside was one-way glass, and the setting sun on the water painted walls in shimmering gold that crooned Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” to Tom’s hot-rod brain. The sun had sunk low enough to irritate eyes, so Bruce pulled a small remote from his pocket and pressed a button, shifting electrically charged polarized glass to translucent white gold. Tom felt the energetic buzz of an unusually large number of electrical wires. They were hidden in the floors, ceilings, and walls, but seemed excessive for even a smart house such as this with every bell and whistle. Also, the floor’s parquet pattern tweaked his brain like puzzle boxes, interesting enough to analyze. He hacked and searched the house’s IT system to see what the fuss was about.
Bruce stood, arms crossed in appraisal. He nodded to Shaft, who disappeared behind a white door. “I’d like to apologize for my behavior. If you’re going to be president, we better get off on the right foot.” But he did not proffer his hand and his eyes were as dead as they had been in Biogineers’s conference room. They studied him, searching for Peter. “Nope . . .” he shook his head. “Nada . . . Whoever it was did a great job. Or maybe you did it, somehow. I don’t see Peter anywhere.”
Vera reclined on the sofa, a satisfied, enigmatic smile curling her lips. “Neither do I.”
“I’d prefer not to talk about this in front of anyone else,” said Tom.
“She knows everything. Why else would you be here?”
Tom tried to contact her telepathically, but he wasn’t sure he could. Vera didn’t move, although she did look at him quizzically. Perhaps he wasn’t the master of time and space he hoped. Meanwhile, Lobo’s security system was enormous and multilayered. He continued analyzing.
“I’d really prefer . . .” said Tom.
“It doesn’t matter what you prefer. My turf. My rules. And Vera doesn’t want to leave. Do you?”
“No, love,” she purred.
“Please sit.” Bruce gestured to a large white oversized armchair. Tom didn’t move. “Chair to your right. So how am I in danger?”
Tom searched with his cane, groping the chair before sitting. “Josiah knows you’ve been double-dipping.”
“How?”
“I told him.”
“And you want me to keep your identity a secret? After that?”
“Yes.
We both need to stop Brant. And you must take over the club.”
“What about your boy toy, Carter?”
“Leave him to me. He’s history. Like Brant.”
“And what’s wrong with Brant?”
“He’s making a terrible mistake. One he and the world will regret. If they have sense enough afterward to regret it. It has to end now. And as he said, you’re not indispensable.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to be president?”
“This has nothing to do with politics.”
“You’re wrong. Everything is politics. Just like taking advantage of brothers’ weaknesses is politics. It’s all about who ends up on top. That’s all politics has ever been. We may have a rotten system, but it’s the only one we’ve got, and I’ll be damned if I’m not at the top of it.”
“So being the biggest predator is it?”
Bruce glared as though Tom was an idiot. “Of course. For instance, what do you offer that I don’t already know? Why should I let you leave?”
“This is not about information. Josiah is going to kill you. Very soon. Take my help to beat him, or die. But either way, I’ll stop him.”
“I think you overestimate yourself. And why do you care about them?” He waved his hands toward the large, opaque windows to indicate an unseen populace. “You know you’re as much like them as you are to sheep.”
“Is that how you see people?”
“It’s hard to believe a man like you doesn’t. You of all people know the world is divided into two groups. Leaders and followers. If you’re smart and ambitious enough to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps to the top of the heap, you get to be a leader. The rest . . .” He shrugged. “I spent my childhood working on sheep ranches. People are a lot like sheep. They flock around leaders, follow them, and depend on them to get them where they want to be, even if they have no idea where that is. The key is they want to be led. Some of the animals I tended were smarter than the farmhands I worked beside. Both got slaughtered eventually, one way or another. And I swore I’d be neither. Has the world ever been any different?”